On Saturday, Carbon Arc has a special presentation of The Stairs, “a work with deep compassion for those who’ve made their way back from the depths of addiction.” A documentary shot over several years that examines the lives of habitual drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park, it won Best Canadian Film of 2016 from the Toronto Film Critics Association. This screening features a post-film Q&A with director Hugh Gibson, hosted by Natasha Pace from Global TV and featuring Nova Scotia Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Strang.

Fundy Cinema in Wolfville has a great documentary pick as well this Wednesday, with the “instantly recognizable masterpiece” Dawson City: Frozen Time, a film which is partly about the discovery in the Yukon of several hundred reels of nitrate film from the 1910s and ’20s, decades after they were presumed permanently lost, but has much more to tell about those early decades of the 20th century. “You don’t just watch Dawson City,” Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, “You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.”

Another film from my 2017 top ten, The Florida Project, also has Wolfville screenings on Sunday.